Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This paper investigates the effects of news on conditional variances in the six Asian emerging markets by using the composite index of news from January 1995 to April 2000. Our results are as follows. First, the greater is the volume of current news, the greater is the volatility in all markets. The effects of current news last for one day in Taiwan and Thailand, but last for at least two days in the other countries. Second, we identify Thailand and Indonesia as "news-rich" markets. Third, we confirm the robustness of results based on the composite index of news by using data from Japanese and US markets. Detailed analysis of news items, which is popular in advanced countries, is necessary even in developing countries to earn extra profits by responding quickly to news.

This study addresses the cost structure and operational efficiency of the credit departments of the farmers' associations in Taiwan, adopting both stochastic cost frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis. The factors that influence operational efficiency are also examined. In particular, problems of loan quality are considered to account for the considerable amount of non-performing loans. The results of this study indicate that economies of scale exist. However, the credit departments of the farmers' associations do not benefit from economies of scope. Non-performing loans are associated with a cost increase of approximately 17.6%. Regression analysis verifies that the non-performing loan ratio significantly and negatively influences all indicators of efficiency and that the 1997 Asian financial crisis also has a negative impact on efficiencies.

It has been argued that keiretsu in Japan allows its member firms to maintain a financial structure different from that of non-keiretsu member firms. In this paper, we use two different types of financial statement ratio analysis techniques to discover whether Kohonen's self-organizing map (SOM) is able to uncover the differences in financial structures between keiretsu and non-keiretsu firms: ad hoc financial ratios and valuation-based financial ratios. We have found some evidence that SOM enables both financial analysis techniques to recognize different financial structures between the two groups of the firms. Implications of this finding for investment decisions have been discussed.

Several researchers have recently shown an interaction between macroeconomic variables and stock returns. Most of these studies have concentrated on interest rates and inflation. These and other variables, of course, have an influence on the debt markets as well. Other variables that can influence the debt and equity markets include employment information. On the first Friday of each month the government releases its employment report for the previous month. Strong growth in employment generally bodes well for economic output and growth in the economy. Any inflation and interest rate implications of a strong employment report will ultimately be reflected in bond and stock prices. It is generally observed that if payroll employment growth is moderately strong prices in the bond market drop while prices in the stock market rise. The empirical evidence presented supports these observations. This study documents the reaction of the bond and the stock markets in response to the employment reports. As the unemployment rate tends to rise so do the bond and the stock markets.

The literature is not clear on whether there are co-dependencies domestically across real estate and stock markets, despite the importance of this question for portfolio diversification strategies. In this article, we use fractional cointegration and long memory techniques to search for co-dependence in the Canadian markets. The measures of long-term persistence employed are the modified rescaled range statistic (R/S) proposed by Lo (1991), and the rescaled variance (V/S) statistic proposed by Giraitis et al. (2003). We find evidence to suggest long co-memories between stock and securitized property markets in the long term, but some evidence is also found in some sub-samples. The implication of our results is that securitized property and stocks are not considered to be substitutable assets over the short run and these assets may be held together in a portfolio for diversification purposes. However, over the long run, there is less benefit of holding both assets in a portfolio, since a fractional cointegration is found in the residual series.

Although perceived as risk-laden, cyclical businesses with high financial and operating leverage, relatively low beta risks have been documented for the international transportation industry. This paper analyses whether such results are robust to different estimation designs and asserts that previous beta estimates are confounded by sample selection problems. Developing a more representative sample and implementing a number of different estimation designs, a range of industry beta estimates are derived. It is concluded that beta estimates of US-listed international transportation stocks are sensitive to estimation design and that industry beta risk is time-varying. This has implications for the industry cost of capital and pricing policies.

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a problem-solving paradigm that uses past experiences to solve new problems. Nearest neighbor is a common CBR algorithm for retrieving similar cases, whose similarity function is sensitive to irrelevant attributes. Taking the relevancy of the attributes into account can reduce this sensitivity, leading to a more effective retrieval of similar cases. In this paper, statistical evaluation is used for assigning relative importance of the attributes. This approach is applied to predict business failures in Australia using financial data. The results in this study indicate it is an effective and competitive alternative to predict business failures in a comprehensible manner. This study also investigates the usefulness of non-financial data derived from auditor's and directors' reports for business failure prediction. The results suggest that the particular non-financial attributes identified are not as effective as the financial attributes in explaining business failures.